● 06.20.23

Gemini version available ♊︎

● Gemini Links 20/06/2023: Gemini’s Fourth Anniversary is Today

Posted in News Roundup at 12:33 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Gemini* and Gopher

Politics and World Events

• Recently I talked with a religious friend about how I find the body very complex. He then jokingly said to me, assuming I believed in his religion, “can you believe that some people think something as complex as a human crawled out of the ocean?” I shrugged it off as I did not want to ruin my relationship with this person (we live in a society), but his comment did make me think.

• [...]

• When he taught us the leg muscles, he used one particularly funny example that I still remember. One certain muscle near the knee (that I forget the name of) prevents the knee joint’s capsule from getting pinched between the femur and tibia bones when the knee bends. He told us the story of how when god, nature, and the space aliens all got together to design the lower extremities, they had problems with their prototype caveman pinching the knee capsule every time he tried to walk. Luckily, baby Jesus came along on his tricycle and suggested that a muscle pull the capsule away from the bones just before they bend, making it so that the caveman could walk just fine.

• Finally got around to finishing Top Gun: Maverick tonight. Rented it from the library a couple weeks ago, but hadn’t gotten around to it until now. Definitely a fun movie, the action scenes were super well done! Love that the “enemy territory” was in a snowy, mountainous region, made for some great visuals. The dogfights were great, had me on the edge of my seat the entire time.

• When I moved in there was grass behind the house, a little, inhospitible backyard past the sandpapery square of concrete patio. Looking out the back door there’s the sun-blasted patio, some grass, swampy yard, then the hill up to the cemetary scrubby with thicket and young trees.

• I dug a bed for mint along the house’s back wall up to the patio, another bed out from it that supports a healthy horseradish where Evy grew gourds. Other plants didn’t do well there til this year when I planted onions. Evy’s parents brought their old painted iron yard table and chairs.

Technology and Free Software

• In a previous article, I explained how to use Fossil version control system to version the files you may write in dom0 and sync them against a remote repository.

• Despite being cheap I decided to buy another Asus laptop from the same family for my little one, also this laptop was purchased as second-hand hardware, even because I was convinced to have definitely resolved all the issues, in the previous tests eventually Devuan worked better than Debian.

• This laptop was meant to be an auxiliary laptop, for writing on the couch. I’m an Apple main user, and knowing macOS has helped my career. But I’m also very pro Right to Repair, and those two things are butting heads right now. So the Framework laptop seemed like the obvious choice, being Very Repairable.

• After reading Ploum’s recent post about how Richard Stallman was right all along, I have to say that I agree with his take.

• [...]

• This might seem odd coming from someone who just posted about how sick he was of Linux and was moving back to FreeBSD. If only all of my choices were easily explainable in life.

• I’ve found myself as I get older actually becoming more “radicalized” than I was in my 20′s and 30′s. I definitely feel like society lost it’s way a long time ago. One of the things that I like most about Ploum’s post is that he recognizes the larger parallels between society’s ills and free/libre vs proprietary software. Everywhere you look these days you see that what used to be held in common trust is being carved up and divided among those who don’t really need any more.

Internet/Gemini

• The Gemini protocol was first publicly announced under the name “Gemini” on this day in 2019. solderpunk considers this to the official start date of the protocol, meaning today is its fourth anniversary.

• From my earliest days on Gemini, I knew the protocol dated back to 2019, but last night I got to thinking about what that really means.

• I first explored Gemini and decided to create my own capsule in March of 2021. By then, COVID-19 had been ravaging the world for more than a year. Many businesses were still shuttered, many areas were still in full lockdown, and most people still practiced social distancing. We were forced to carry out most of our communication through social media and other online platforms controlled by corporate interests. The Reddit post became our only source of news, the Netflix subscription our only form of entertainment. And in that isolated environment, political and social tensions spilled over, fresh on the heels of the George Floyd protests and riots on one side and the contentious US Presidential election and January 6 protests and riots on the other.

Literature

• Alex wrote an excellent quick post about using local libraries. It reminded me of when my mother used to take me and my brother to the library almost every day as a child; they really are excellent places with incredible services.

• As Alex wrote about the physical benefits and services of libraries, I thought I should share some of the digital ones. I agree that going to a library can be an amazing experience, but it is also useful to know how to get the most out of yours when you can’t go there in person.

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